Your hard drive's holding gigabytes of digital photos you've been snapping for years hostage, keeping all those memories of people and places in the digital dark. Your photos can make others smile on a personalized photo gift, for a holiday or for no reason at all.

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Sure you can have a tee-shirt, mousepad or coffee mug made with a photo on it, but today we've got a few lesser-known photo gift ideas to share.

One of the greatest sites inspired by photo-sharing service Flickr isfd's Flickr
Toys, which features an ever-increasing number of tools for photo-creations. Several of the toys can serve as a great starting point for innovative gifts. Despite the name, the features are not restricted to use with Flickr images. All you have to do is specify a photo URL or a picture on your hard drive to take advantage of most tools on the Web site.

Valentine's cards/Gift tags

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Create customized cards with the Trading Card
Maker. The service lets you specify different types of backgrounds, a title above the image and a subtitle right below it. There is also a field for adding a personalized message. All of these elements are optional so you can skip any or all of them. Leaving the bottom portion empty leaves you the option of adding a hand-written message later.

If you would like to spice up your image with a thought cloud before generating the card then head over to the Captioner.
This feature lets you specify up to four captions and whether you want these to be speech balloons, thought bubbles or large-letter action items. The system will generate these for you and you can drag and drop the elements onto the picture wherever you desire. Some additional decoration items are also available, such as party hats. These show up below the image. The service is very flexible and lets you move the objects around until you find the perfect spot for them.

Memory game

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Featured on Lifehacker earlier, the memory game is a tried-and-true fun gift idea. The goal of the game Memory is to find pairs of pictures. The game starts out with all cards facing down. Players take turn in flipping two cards at a time to see if they can find a match. If the two cards do not match then it is the next person's turn. The one with the most pairs at the end wins.

To create a memory card set, order wallet-sized images of your photos. Cut them up and organize them by pairs. Wallet-sized photos usually come in sets of four so you can create two sets of the game from one order. This works best with 12 or 25 photo pairs.

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Movie posters and magazine covers

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Make stars out of your gift recipients by putting their pictures on movie posters. The service lets you choose from among a dozen different fonts for the title and lets you include production, acting, directing credits and whatever other important movie role you want to credit to someone. In case you or your gift's recipient is more of a magazine fan, the site also has a handy magazine cover tool.

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Photo magnets

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Whether for use with traditional photos or your Flickr toy creations, photo magnets are a gift that may well stay with the recipient for years to come. Just order wallet-sized or 3x5 versions of your photos, cards, movie posters or magazine covers and put these in a photo
magnet frame. (Note: I haven't actually ordered a magnet photo frame from from this site, so I can't vouch for them. Proceed with caution.)

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Collages

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While images on their own can look great, sometimes a photo collage adds something extra to a picture gift. The Mosaic maker helps you take advantage of the various ways in which photos are organized on Flickr. You can create a mosaic out of specific pictures you specify or images based on a Flickr photo set, favorites or specific tags.

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Photo movie

It's also surprisingly easy to make a Ken Burns style movie from your still photos and add music, narration, captions and titles, either to send via email, host on the web or burn to DVD. See previous Lifehacker feature How to create a multimedia photo movie for more details.

Ordering

Lots of sites offer online printing services for numerous photo sizes and products as well. The magazine cover you can order directly from fd's Flickr Toys site. Otherwise, just upload your image to one of many photo processing sites.

These and other services (e.g. Cafepress) offer numerous photo gift ideas as well. You can get your favorite picture printed on anything from aprons to clocks, from jigsaw puzzles to stamps. The possibilities seem endless.